11 ms·

My experience is that “talent” in a superstar city jumps around between major companies every year or three in search of better salary. There is an expectation

My experience is that “talent” in a superstar city jumps around between major companies every year or three in search of better salary. There is an expectation then that each new hire is immediately put to work and depending on your level, you are coding almost 100% of the time. I’ve now lived in a much smaller city for the past 5 years. My company hires both senior developers tired of the mercenary treadmill as well as many recent grads that stay for longer than three years since we invest in their career growth and provide much more mentorship. Also the biking distance commute to work are a big selling point. I loved living in a big city in my 20s but don’t regret moving away in my 30s. my quality of life and financial freedom is immeasurably improved. This regularly surprises my acquaintances that stayed.

threwawasy1228 7y ago
This seems really dependent on finding a good company with openings, which is not always the case. I tried to stay in the Midwest as a recent cs grad with an internship under my belt, but after spending 4 months doing job search I just gave up and went coastal. 1. The offers I got were abysmally small and out of touch with the market even when adjusting for my experience and local cost of living. 2. Most places were either extremely poorly reviewed on glassdoor, or were not hiring junior/midlevel developers. 3. Places I interviewed at were using ancient software stacks from 2000-era that would have hampered my professional growth. Until all these things are fixed and accounted for there is no way brain drain is going to stop. I literally spent 4 months interviewing, fully willing to relocate in the general Midwest to stay in a smaller more affordable town within reasonable driving distance of my family. If people want to keep smart people around, give them reasonable offers in line with the global market, and take risks on junior developers.
- Grzegrzolka 7y ago
  It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.
  - arkh 7y ago
    > It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.
      - jswizzy 7y ago
        I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.
      - arkh 7y ago
        2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.
        adrianN 7y ago
        That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.
- beering 7y ago
  In my experience, a lot of the companies in the Midwest wouldn't survive if they were paying salaries aligned with big coastal tech. I.e., they exist in the Midwest because they can't exist elsewhere. And the rest are taking advantage of people who don't have the motivation or freedom to move out. (I knew a lot of CS grads in the Midwest who didn't bother applying to coastal companies.)
- cvhashim 7y ago
  Tell me more about your interview process? I'm trying to get out of the midwest as well. All my friends from school are out in the coastal cities.
- derek1800 7y ago
  I moved back to the Midwest from the West Coast once having kids to be close to family and be able to afford a house. I do think it is hard to find the pockets of exciting jobs in the Midwest that pay reasonably well. I personally got lucky with Amazon in Detroit which is an engineering office with exciting projects. One good thing is the pay for Amazon doesn’t change from Seattle to Detroit which is awesome.
- esotericn 7y ago
  This is a fairly global phenomenon I think. I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market. I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote. Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing. The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.
  - systemtest 7y ago
    Is this a Northern Sweden problem or a Sweden problem in general? I've looked at a couple of hiring boards and hourly contractor rates are only €50-€70, even in Stockholm. Compared to the €70-€90 in London and Amsterdam that sounds a bit low, but please correct me if I am wrong.
    - zprunger 7y ago
      If you're contracting in Sweden you are 90% looking at Stockholm (the remaining 10% being Gothenburg or Malmö/Copenhagen). My experience is that Stockholm hourly rates are around 750-1200 SEK which would be ap. 70-110 EUR. I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.
      - systemtest 7y ago
        In that case I was looking at the wrong rates, thank you for the correction.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Not the midwest per se, but Salk Lake City has more software jobs than you shake a stick at. One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.
- thew1ndyman 7y ago
  Grew up and graduated from a small University in the Midwest. All of those are a big problem especially with remote work which I prefer. Before we moved for school I interviewed a couple places in the city and they would offer 60% of offers for remote positions and I would have to commute ~30 mins each way? No thanks. The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in
dwoozle 7y ago
Not to mention that the quality of life outside big cities is far healthier and more human scale and human paced. People are more focused on things like children than on Kubernetes — the world needs progress but boy does it take a toll. In the Bay Area I worked with people making $400K who said they decided they could only afford two kids. Meanwhile where I live now it’s very feasible for a schoolteacher couple to afford five kids, and not in privation. I like that Elon Musk exists but holy hell I do not want his life.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  people don't realize the enormous difference in living cost of bay area vs midwest. 400K on the penninsula is less than 150K in the midwest. I once calculated the average salaries of the bay area vs mid western cities and adjusted those salaries based on the cost of housing: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-software-engineering-salaries-adjusted-for-col/ https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-...
  - tracer4201 7y ago
    I’d rather earn $400K for several years, live as cheaply as possible, and when I start to feel fatigued, then switch to one of these slower companies in the Midwest. By that time, your portfolio is decent strong and you’re already set for retirement. Starting your career in the Midwest at their typical salary levels and given the kinds of problems many of these companies or their IT departments are solving is a very short sighted approach. I say that having been there. I pivoted my career. My first 6 months I had more impact and learned way more than in working 4 years in the Midwest.
  - braindeath 7y ago
    These calculators are highly misleading. You absolutely can live comfortably and squirrel away much more cash at 400k anywhere in the US vs 150k. I’ve lived this experience between “low” COL and high areas.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Lets compare salaries on a city by city basis and adjust those salaries based on the Cost of living in dollars per square foot (cost of a house/condo from Zillow). To calculate the location adjusted salary, we simply multiply the salary by 500 (rough average of $/sq foot) and divide by the cost per square foot in that city. This comparison makes sense only if your salary is spent on literally nothing else but housing.
CinchWrench 7y ago
The dirty secret about staying in smaller markets through your 20s and 30s is that your pay never catches up. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but I'm swallowing some pretty bitter pills here having just crossed the 30 year mark and watching my company hire in people at my level for 20-50% more.
- warent 7y ago
  I don't think that's the market. It sounds more likely that you're just not negotiating well or selling yourself to your best advantage, or you're accepting a tradeoff for something else in return. My advice is to search for a new job ASAP seeking 50% more than what you're making now, tweak how you're applying and interview, and you'll have it within a year or less. Remember also that remote work is becoming much more normal.
  - maximente 7y ago
    great advice; i agree completely. that response was so passive and defeatist i'm almost upset on his/her behalf. it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs.
    - lsc 7y ago
      >it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs. (and not just top engineers; just about everyone benefits from competing offers. If you haven't gotten a competing offer in the last year or two, you have no idea what you could be getting, and you are probably underpaid.) This, I think, is one of the major advantages of silicon valley; I can walk from my house to tens of big name employers; hundreds of smaller ones. I can switch jobs and I don't have to move. I can pretty easily still get drinks with the same people after work (if that's what we all want) - and the culture is such that it's okay to go work somewhere else for a few years and then to come back. it's not even a little weird.
  - privateSFacct 7y ago
    I'm curious if what is current / high level work in midwest is different to what you are exposed to at least in SF -> there is a risk in some quieter areas that you just are not current and plugged in with the meetups, the hackathons, exposure to strong other talent. When I was in my late 20's someone gave me a real kick in the butt to go the distance -> which paid off in hindsight big time.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>my quality of life and financial freedom is immeasurably improved. This regularly surprises my acquaintances that stayed. The people of Austin once had traffic free commutes and the people of Denver could once easily afford housing. Then other people became aware of those things, showed up in droves and those good things went away. If you want to keep your perks in the long term you should probably not be telling everyone how great it is.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Build more homes. Put them near these new jobs. Add schools and bike routes. Cities aren't static unless they're dying.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    You're not wrong but I have zero faith that importing a bunch of people from the SV tech scene isn't going to stifle housing construction with SV style zoning, stifle infrastructure improvements with pandering to the environmental crowd^, and price out everyone who isn't making six figures in the proces. Of course they all realize SV style regulation of land use sucks, you need to allow for density and all that but everyone is gonna push for the one or two "little things" that they liked and you have a tragedy of the commons. I know everyone is gonna read this and thing "I would never do that" but as they say, a person is smart but people are stupid. ^not that that isn't a consideration but in an urban setting "plan, build, assess, mitigate any impacts" is a better workflow than "never building anything because there's always one person who isn't yet satisfied with the proposed environmental impact".
    - CalRobert 7y ago
      We agree - SV is a disaster for the reasons you state, though it's worked tidily for anyone who bought a house there 30 years ago. Texas likes to take an anti-regulation stance as I understand it, so maybe they could address that. The first step could be to remove the parking minimums they impose despite their anti-regulation reputation...
techslave 7y ago
> recent grads that stay for longer than three years since we invest in their career growth and provide much more mentorship. definitely not why recent grads stay. wet behind the ears folks don’t know any better so don’t know how good they have it. they stay for either the reason they are there in the first place: quality of life; or out out of inertia; or from lack of thinking big. NOT because they realize they’ve got it good.

threwawasy1228 7y ago

This seems really dependent on finding a good company with openings, which is not always the case. I tried to stay in the Midwest as a recent cs grad with an internship under my belt, but after spending 4 months doing job search I just gave up and went coastal. 1. The offers I got were abysmally small and out of touch with the market even when adjusting for my experience and local cost of living. 2. Most places were either extremely poorly reviewed on glassdoor, or were not hiring junior/midlevel developers. 3. Places I interviewed at were using ancient software stacks from 2000-era that would have hampered my professional growth. Until all these things are fixed and accounted for there is no way brain drain is going to stop. I literally spent 4 months interviewing, fully willing to relocate in the general Midwest to stay in a smaller more affordable town within reasonable driving distance of my family. If people want to keep smart people around, give them reasonable offers in line with the global market, and take risks on junior developers.

Grzegrzolka 7y ago
It's very easy to explain. Even very weak companies that are located in "hot" cities have chance to catch really experienced and knowledgable talent. One good guy employed for 6 months can be an amazing catalyst of great changes, you can very quickly modernize process and technologies if you have passionate people on board. It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. The "less popular" places are the polar opposite of this mindset. If talent is not easily available, you will find companies with no proper culture, stupidly old technologies and "old guard" not wanting to change much if anything.
- arkh 7y ago
  > It does not matter that they will all leave in couple months, the know-how will stay. How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    There is resume driven introduction of new technologies and then there is introducing modern source control, a CI pipeline, a modern compiler toolchain with activated warnings, a usable bugtracker... all of which is often missing in small companies that only do software on the side, or live in a slow moving market.
    - jswizzy 7y ago
      I work in defense contracting and version control is either non existent or dated at most companies. I've gotten very good at selling git to management.
    - arkh 7y ago
      2 months to introduce those kind of changes usually mean it will still be in the "people don't want to change their way of doing things" phase. With most of the infrastructure half deployed, the process ready to be cargo-culted and a lot of things directly copied from stack-overflow into critical parts of this process. The know-how never got shared and won't appear to fill the void.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        That our hypothetical tornado managed to start introducing change during just 6 months is imho a strong sign that at least some people want to change. In my experience introducing changes takes years.
beering 7y ago
In my experience, a lot of the companies in the Midwest wouldn't survive if they were paying salaries aligned with big coastal tech. I.e., they exist in the Midwest because they can't exist elsewhere. And the rest are taking advantage of people who don't have the motivation or freedom to move out. (I knew a lot of CS grads in the Midwest who didn't bother applying to coastal companies.)
cvhashim 7y ago
Tell me more about your interview process? I'm trying to get out of the midwest as well. All my friends from school are out in the coastal cities.
derek1800 7y ago
I moved back to the Midwest from the West Coast once having kids to be close to family and be able to afford a house. I do think it is hard to find the pockets of exciting jobs in the Midwest that pay reasonably well. I personally got lucky with Amazon in Detroit which is an engineering office with exciting projects. One good thing is the pay for Amazon doesn’t change from Seattle to Detroit which is awesome.
esotericn 7y ago
This is a fairly global phenomenon I think. I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market. I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote. Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing. The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.
- systemtest 7y ago
  Is this a Northern Sweden problem or a Sweden problem in general? I've looked at a couple of hiring boards and hourly contractor rates are only €50-€70, even in Stockholm. Compared to the €70-€90 in London and Amsterdam that sounds a bit low, but please correct me if I am wrong.
  - zprunger 7y ago
    If you're contracting in Sweden you are 90% looking at Stockholm (the remaining 10% being Gothenburg or Malmö/Copenhagen). My experience is that Stockholm hourly rates are around 750-1200 SEK which would be ap. 70-110 EUR. I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.
    - systemtest 7y ago
      In that case I was looking at the wrong rates, thank you for the correction.
paulddraper 7y ago
Not the midwest per se, but Salk Lake City has more software jobs than you shake a stick at. One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.
thew1ndyman 7y ago
Grew up and graduated from a small University in the Midwest. All of those are a big problem especially with remote work which I prefer. Before we moved for school I interviewed a couple places in the city and they would offer 60% of offers for remote positions and I would have to commute ~30 mins each way? No thanks. The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in

dwoozle 7y ago

Not to mention that the quality of life outside big cities is far healthier and more human scale and human paced. People are more focused on things like children than on Kubernetes — the world needs progress but boy does it take a toll. In the Bay Area I worked with people making $400K who said they decided they could only afford two kids. Meanwhile where I live now it’s very feasible for a schoolteacher couple to afford five kids, and not in privation. I like that Elon Musk exists but holy hell I do not want his life.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
people don't realize the enormous difference in living cost of bay area vs midwest. 400K on the penninsula is less than 150K in the midwest. I once calculated the average salaries of the bay area vs mid western cities and adjusted those salaries based on the cost of housing: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-software-engineering-salaries-adjusted-for-col/ https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-...
- tracer4201 7y ago
  I’d rather earn $400K for several years, live as cheaply as possible, and when I start to feel fatigued, then switch to one of these slower companies in the Midwest. By that time, your portfolio is decent strong and you’re already set for retirement. Starting your career in the Midwest at their typical salary levels and given the kinds of problems many of these companies or their IT departments are solving is a very short sighted approach. I say that having been there. I pivoted my career. My first 6 months I had more impact and learned way more than in working 4 years in the Midwest.
- braindeath 7y ago
  These calculators are highly misleading. You absolutely can live comfortably and squirrel away much more cash at 400k anywhere in the US vs 150k. I’ve lived this experience between “low” COL and high areas.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Lets compare salaries on a city by city basis and adjust those salaries based on the Cost of living in dollars per square foot (cost of a house/condo from Zillow). To calculate the location adjusted salary, we simply multiply the salary by 500 (rough average of $/sq foot) and divide by the cost per square foot in that city. This comparison makes sense only if your salary is spent on literally nothing else but housing.

CinchWrench 7y ago

The dirty secret about staying in smaller markets through your 20s and 30s is that your pay never catches up. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but I'm swallowing some pretty bitter pills here having just crossed the 30 year mark and watching my company hire in people at my level for 20-50% more.

warent 7y ago
I don't think that's the market. It sounds more likely that you're just not negotiating well or selling yourself to your best advantage, or you're accepting a tradeoff for something else in return. My advice is to search for a new job ASAP seeking 50% more than what you're making now, tweak how you're applying and interview, and you'll have it within a year or less. Remember also that remote work is becoming much more normal.
- maximente 7y ago
  great advice; i agree completely. that response was so passive and defeatist i'm almost upset on his/her behalf. it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs.
  - lsc 7y ago
    >it is almost beyond belief what high quality engineers can earn by simply changing jobs. (and not just top engineers; just about everyone benefits from competing offers. If you haven't gotten a competing offer in the last year or two, you have no idea what you could be getting, and you are probably underpaid.) This, I think, is one of the major advantages of silicon valley; I can walk from my house to tens of big name employers; hundreds of smaller ones. I can switch jobs and I don't have to move. I can pretty easily still get drinks with the same people after work (if that's what we all want) - and the culture is such that it's okay to go work somewhere else for a few years and then to come back. it's not even a little weird.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  I'm curious if what is current / high level work in midwest is different to what you are exposed to at least in SF -> there is a risk in some quieter areas that you just are not current and plugged in with the meetups, the hackathons, exposure to strong other talent. When I was in my late 20's someone gave me a real kick in the butt to go the distance -> which paid off in hindsight big time.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

>my quality of life and financial freedom is immeasurably improved. This regularly surprises my acquaintances that stayed. The people of Austin once had traffic free commutes and the people of Denver could once easily afford housing. Then other people became aware of those things, showed up in droves and those good things went away. If you want to keep your perks in the long term you should probably not be telling everyone how great it is.

CalRobert 7y ago
Build more homes. Put them near these new jobs. Add schools and bike routes. Cities aren't static unless they're dying.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  You're not wrong but I have zero faith that importing a bunch of people from the SV tech scene isn't going to stifle housing construction with SV style zoning, stifle infrastructure improvements with pandering to the environmental crowd^, and price out everyone who isn't making six figures in the proces. Of course they all realize SV style regulation of land use sucks, you need to allow for density and all that but everyone is gonna push for the one or two "little things" that they liked and you have a tragedy of the commons. I know everyone is gonna read this and thing "I would never do that" but as they say, a person is smart but people are stupid. ^not that that isn't a consideration but in an urban setting "plan, build, assess, mitigate any impacts" is a better workflow than "never building anything because there's always one person who isn't yet satisfied with the proposed environmental impact".
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    We agree - SV is a disaster for the reasons you state, though it's worked tidily for anyone who bought a house there 30 years ago. Texas likes to take an anti-regulation stance as I understand it, so maybe they could address that. The first step could be to remove the parking minimums they impose despite their anti-regulation reputation...

techslave 7y ago

> recent grads that stay for longer than three years since we invest in their career growth and provide much more mentorship. definitely not why recent grads stay. wet behind the ears folks don’t know any better so don’t know how good they have it. they stay for either the reason they are there in the first place: quality of life; or out out of inertia; or from lack of thinking big. NOT because they realize they’ve got it good.